Free Republic

Click here.

I would like to know if anyone has heard why the use of stem cells from the umbilical cord isn't being considered an option??This option seems to be the best and simplest way to get the stem cells.

"Who are our enemies? Who are our friends?" Mao Zedong (¤ò¿AªF) asked in 1926. It is a useful question to keep in mind in the wake of the friendship treaty just signed between Russian President Putin and China's President Jiang Zemin (¦¿¿A¥Á). Fear of enemies and the need to destroy them remains overpowering among Mao's heirs. It explains their imprisonment of members of the tiny Democratic Party; of Catholics loyal to Rome; of Protestants, Buddhists, and Muslims who resist supervision by the party's Patriotic Church; the oppression of Tibet and the hunting down of the millions of adherents of Falun ...

A dozen environmentalists filed into the ornate third-floor conference room of the Environmental Protection Agency at 4:30 p.m. on July 26 and took seats around an enormous table. A mid-afternoon thunderstorm had cleared the swampy D.C. air, but inside, tensions were steaming. Arrayed in the room just blocks from the White House were many of the leading supporters of a plan to dredge the Hudson River of some 100,000 pounds of PCB’s, or polychlorinated biphenyls. The environmentalists had been seeking such a meeting, they said, since January. With E.P.A. administrator Christie Todd Whitman’s decision imminent about whether to proceed with ...

MOSCOW, July 31 (UPI) -- Russia will continue building nuclear-powered submarines despite the setback caused by the sinking of the fleet's flagship, the Kursk, last year, Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said Tuesday. "The naval strategic nuclear forces are a basic element of our nuclear triad," Ivanov was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency while on an inspection trip to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, in the Russian Far East. "They will definitely be maintained." perfected and developed." Reflecting on the cause of the Kursk accident, which killed the vessel's entire crew of 118 sailors, Ivanov said "one should not make far-reaching conclusions ...

HOT SPRINGS, Ark. (AP) -- Bill Clinton is going to bat for his hometown. In an effort to promote the resort town of Hot Springs as Clinton's hometown, advertising executives have cooked up a plan to put the ex-president on a baseball card. Steve Arrison, executive director of the city's Advertising and Promotion Commission, said he and his sales director came up with the idea after fielding endless questions about Clinton's connection to Hot Springs, where the former president spent much of his boyhood. Not only will the Clinton card describe the president's relation to the town, but it ...

President Chen Shui-bian (³¯¤ô«ó) has agreed to accept a US National Press Club invitation and to give a "Newsmaker Luncheon Speech" at the club's headquarters in Washington DC in September or October, local media reported. The National Press Club on July 17 invited Chen. The club's president Richard Ryan on Monday revealed that Chen has accepted the invitation. "I visited the Press Club as a Morning Newsmaker in December of 1999, and I would be most happy and honored to accept your invitation to visit again as a luncheon speaker," Chen replied in his letter to Ryan on July 25. ...

Senate Democratic leaders have decided for now to allow Vice President Dick Cheney to shift all the electricity bills for his official home to the Navy, a plan that had been criticized by Democrats as evidence of a double standard. A spending bill that includes the bookkeeping shift has already been approved by the Senate Appropriations Committee and awaits a final vote on the Senate floor, possibly this week. The White House had requested the budget transfer, citing the large and fluctuating electricity bills for Mr. Cheney's 33-room residence, which is on the grounds of the Washington Naval Observatory. The ...

A FRONT-PAGE story about minimum wages in The Wall Street Journal illustrates what is wrong with contemporary journalism as much as it illustrates anything about the minimum wage law. The first nine paragraphs deal with one individual who is wholly atypical of people earning the minimum wage. She is a 46-year-old single mother who works full-time. Way back on page 10, we learn from a small chart that just over half the people earning the minimum wage are from 16 to 24 years of age. Just over half of the minimum wage earners are working part-time. Nevertheless, the atypical ...

Posted at 11:42 p.m. PDT Tuesday, July 31, 2001 Davis advisers' Calpine links hit Governor, generator deny special deal BY JOHN WOOLFOLK AND NOAM LEVEY Mercury News With Gray Davis' foes heaping criticism on state officials who invested in Calpine, the San Jose company became the focus of questions Tuesday about its warm relationship with the administration during the energy crisis. For months, the governor has singled out Calpine for praise, making a trip to a Calpine-sponsored festival in San Jose, endorsing the company's controversial San Jose project and traveling around the state to turn on new Calpine plants. Perhaps ...

OPINION journalism is one of the few businesses where the customers not only seek to get you fired as a matter of course, but also think they're doing you a favor by keeping you in the loop as they try to do it. As a case in point: A reader forwarded me a copy of a letter she wrote to her local paper: "Dear Editor, Surely The Express Times can do better for a op-ed columnist than Jonah Goldberg. In the last few weeks we've been treated to a bigoted rant against the French and an argument for drilling ...

A SELF-CONFESSED serial killer has been hailed by religious hardliners in Iran as a national hero for murdering 16 prostitutes in one of the country's holiest cities.The case of the "Spider Killer", Saeed Hanayi, a 39-year-old builder, has polarised opinion since he was arrested last week and admitted the killings. The reaction illustrates the bitter struggle between religious hardliners and liberals seeking to loosen theocratic restrictions on everyday life.Liberals believe that the killer may have been linked to Islamic fundamentalists. The victims were strangled with their headscarves and then wrapped in the Muslim black chador robes, like a spider's prey ...

The first lady has asked the news media to leave her twin daughters "totally alone." She said on CNN Monday night: "If we never saw their pictures in the paper again, we'd be a lot happier. I think it's selling magazines and newspaper articles and television at the expense of my children, that's what I think it is." She is correct in asking for privacy for the girls. I regret that I have been one of the violators. Last week I wrote an opinion piece based on two reports in the Times of London that said her daughter Barbara attended ...

THE work-entrance door on the ground floor of 55 W. 125th St., the building Bill Clinton moved into this week, was open and revealed a swatch of special building permits for work still being done. The last time permits were involved it was because all work on Clinton's office was stopped in order to build a shower as big as a truck wash. This convinced everybody that Clinton was actually going to stay here, that he had no intention of using the place as a mail drop. "What's he need done up there now?" one of the workmen was ...

By SHEILA BURKE Staff Writer Willie Houston was shot with his hands in the air, raising his palms in front of his chest and reasoning with the gunman: ''Man, we had a good time, and I'm just ready to go home and go to bed.'' The man fired anyway, sending a fatal bullet to Houston's chest. That's how Houston's fiancée, Nedra Jones, recalled details yesterday of the shooting early Sunday morning in the Opry Mills parking lot. Jones, Houston and two friends had gone on a midnight cruise on the General Jackson showboat sponsored by radio station 92Q. When ...

August 1, 2001 EDITORIAL Ethical Short Circuit          "I invested in a growing California company," said the governor's spokesman, Steve Maviglio, defending his May 31 purchase of $12,000 worth of stock in Calpine, a giant electric power generating company. Let's count what's wrong with that defense. May 31 was still at the height of the energy crisis, the state was buying billions of dollars worth of energy from Calpine and the company had just cleared the way to build a state-approved plant in San Jose. Gov. Gray Davis and Maviglio, his press secretary and acting director of ...

HOMELESS ADVOCATE WILEY DRAKE AND FIRST SOUTHERN BAPTIST CHURCH FILE FEDERAL LAWSUIT AGAINST JUDGE GREG L. PRICKETT AND THE SUPERIOR COURT OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA. July 31, 2001 at 12:20 p.m., Case # SACVO1-716 NM (RC) was assigned to the homeless case and the cause of action read.. FEDERALSTATURE, 440 CIVIL RIGHTS PROCEDURAL DUE PROCESS UNDER 42 U.S.C. SECTION 1983. Pastor said that after Prickett had him drug down the the halls ofjustice," I mad as heck, and enough is enough. There is no place in society for judges who personally amend the rights given to the people as ...

A Cowpens man reported $7,000 in cash missing from his pocket after he passed out while drinking beer with friends. Spartanburg County Sheriff's Office spokesman Lt. Ron Gahagan said Tuesday that Billy Lamar Fowler, 47, of 1 Seminole Trail filed the complaint. Fowler said he and two other men were drinking beer on River Drive in an area near a barn Sunday night. One of the men left, and Fowler said he and the third man continued drinking, according to the report. Fowler estimates he passed out shortly after midnight, the report stated. He woke up about 9 a.m. Monday. ...

WASHINGTON, Aug 1, 2001 -- (dpa) The Chinese Embassy said there was no political agenda behind cuts in an interview with U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell broadcast in China over the weekend, USA Today newspaper reported Tuesday. Zhang Yuanyuan, the Chinese embassy spokesman, was responding to criticism from the U.S. State Department on Monday about deletions of Powell's comments on sensitive human rights issues and Taiwan. The interview was made during Powell's one day visit to China on Saturday. Zhang said the cuts were prompted by pressure of time and competing news events, such as the first English Channel ...

Mob Case Has Privacy Implications NewsMax.com WiresTuesday, July 31, 2001 NEWARK, N.J. - A federal judge Monday ordered lawyers to submit more information in a closely watched Mob gambling case that should help sharpen the increasingly blurred lines between high-tech policing practices and constitutional guarantees. Nicodemo Scarfo, son of jailed mob boss Nicodemo "Little Nicky" Scarfo, is facing FBI charges of overseeing bookmaking and loan sharking operations. Using a device that secretly recorded Scarfo's computer keystrokes, agents got hold of a password he used to decrypt illegal transaction records he kept on his computer. The agents had seized Scarfo's ...